3.7 Designs Inbound Marketing: Our 6-Step Process for Success

Inbound marketing, when done correctly, gets results. Studies have found that well-executed inbound campaigns generate 54% more leads than traditional outbound campaigns and are 10x more effective for converting leads. But the key word here is correctly. 

Having a proven, repeatable blueprint is critical to inbound marketing success. And that’s what we want to share with you in this post. The 3.7 Designs inbound marketing process is backed by strategy, informed by research, and driven by data. It’s a consistent process with consistent results. 

Here’s what the six steps look like. 

1. Discovery

Every campaign is unique. From inbound marketing KPIs to buyer personas to the buyer journey, the first step is assessing the internal structure of your company to identify your true goals. This is known as the discovery stage. 

A key part of the discovery stage is performing a brand audit to determine your strengths and weaknesses and what needs to be done to improve. There’s also a competitive audit where we identify the strengths and weaknesses of your primary competitors to help you stand out in your industry.

Take, for example, Insulgard, a leader in architectural security solutions like bullet-resistant windows and doors. They had two main issues. One, their site was poorly designed, visually dated, and not mobile-friendly, which caused poor returns on marketing investments and hurt conversions. Two, their SEO was sub-par, and they weren’t ranking for targeted keywords. 

The first thing we did was to learn everything we could about their business, target audience, competitors, and objectives to assess their situation. As a result, we identified the key attributes of the Insulgard brand and what distinguished them from the competition. This guided the subsequent phases of our approach, which brings us to our next step.

2. Strategy

Next, we use our findings from the discovery phase to create a concrete plan forward, focusing on the following areas:

• Inbound marketing channels
• Product or service offers
• Workflows
• Calls-to-action
• Overall campaign direction

With Insulgard, for instance, we created a fully fleshed-out strategy that identified the approach we’d take to improve web design to build brand awareness, attract new prospects, and turn visitors into qualified leads.

3. Creative

From there we create optimal content, using stunning visuals to properly showcase it. This can include everything from the overall copywriting throughout your site to specific landing pages to assets like case studies, whitepapers, and eBooks. 

For Insulgard, the 3.7 Designs inbound marketing campaign involved designing a visual layer that fully conveyed their unique, leading position within the architectural security solutions industry. We chose to build Insulgard’s site on WordPress, which featured:

• Beautiful, professional aesthetics
• Built-in mobile responsiveness for optimal functioning across multiple devices like laptops, tablets, and smartphones 
• Streamlined content management so the Insulgard team could easily update their visuals and content

Here’s what their site currently looks like. 

We also performed extensive keyword research to identify keyword opportunities with significant search volume and minimal competition. From there, we optimized Insulgard’s site and content to improve their performance in search engines. 

It’s important to note that most website traffic (about 80%) isn’t ready to buy or even have a sales discussion right off the bat. These visitors need to be nurtured where you focus on relationship-building and providing them with the right types of content throughout the different stages of the buyer’s journey — awareness, consideration, and decision. That’s why we emphasize capturing leads early and supplying them with relevant, personalized content to gradually move them toward sales opportunities later on.

4. Traffic

At this point, we source qualified traffic through relevant digital channels. First, we set up a campaign, then formally launch it. With Insulgard, the primary traffic source was search engines, so we made that our main point of emphasis to help them rank better for targeted keywords. For example, they currently rank number two for the keyword phrase “bullet resistant security windows.” 

This, along with ranking for numerous other keywords, has been integral to their campaign and has had a significant impact. To quantify, Insulgard reached page one for over 100 different keyword terms and saw a 400% increase in organic search traffic. In turn, this resulted in a 1,000% increase in leads, which was a night and day difference from their sluggish search performance before the 3.7 Designs inbound marketing strategy. 

Getting on the first page of Google searches was the ultimate goal of their campaign, and using a proven, repeatable blueprint has been instrumental in achieving that.

5. Analysis

A successful campaign seldom takes a “one-off approach” where you finish a project, wrap it up, and call it a day. No matter how effective the initial results are, there’s always room for improvement. That’s why the fifth step of our process is analysis, where we study the data to see what’s working, what’s not, and what we can do to improve. 

Some specific KPIs we look at are website impressions, clicks, visitor behavior, and conversions. As we gather more data, we can then make the right adjustments to optimize a campaign and get better results. 

We may, for example, test two types of marketing content to see which one prospects are more receptive to. One may be sales-heavy with a fairly aggressive approach. The other may be more subtle like a case study that articulates the exact results a real-life customer saw. We would analyze which type of content performed better based on impressions, clicks, conversions, and so on. 

And this brings us to the sixth and final step in the 3.7 Designs inbound marketing process.

6. Optimization

The last piece of the puzzle is implementing the findings from our analysis to transfer them back into the campaign and share them with the brand. Here we create a hypothesis, perform split testing, record the results, and share our findings. 

Say that, after analysis, we concluded that the case study received more impressions, clicks, and conversions. We would then apply our findings to guide our future efforts to create content the audience is more responsive to. In this example, that may mean creating additional case studies across different industries to appeal to a larger percentage of a brand’s audience. 

From there, it’s just a matter of rinsing and repeating where we continually analyze incoming data and keep optimizing based on our findings. As the campaign goes on and more data is generated, we’re able to keep improving, which results in a better buyer journey and more impressive results. 

Applying the 3.7 Designs Inbound Marketing Process to Your Campaign 

There’s no denying the impact of an effective, well-planned inbound marketing campaign. Success requires developing a proven, repeatable formula that’s built on research and quantifiable data. 

Our six-step process has been built through years of trial and error and refinement. Our process gets results for every client in every industry. And it can work for your business as well. It’s just a matter of breaking it down sequentially and seeing the big picture. 

If you’d like to learn more about our approach or discuss a potential project, feel free to reach out to us today.